Dynamic Street Art

Alder Street sticker invasion: Notice the appropriation of “official” municipal space to carve out the combination of offhand soapbox oratory and punk reference points (“Racism Sucks” is a 7 Seconds song from their “Skins, Brains, and Guts” EP). As the sign provides the bus line info, does it also give us the unofficial “lowdown” on culture clash (it sucks, but it’s a reality? or it sucks, so stop it, now…), or does it suggest that bus lines and official powers actually shape part of the problem?

To riff on the phrasing of Claudia Wilde (“Sticker City”), who are the not-so-accidental art custodians of Eugene, the micro-sticker city snuck in the gray dismality of the Northwest, right in the pathway of track town USA? Could one of them be my student Ross, who explains why he pastes stickers of Hippy Tree on the skin of this scene:

One of the reasons why I put the stickers up, just about everywhere is because I want to help this company(more like way of life) to the people of Eugene and Oregon. The company is a surf clothing company from where I live, and I know one of the founders. The stickers are very plain and look pretty sick, and memorable. I like to put them up because I feel in our urbanized society, we need to keep in mind that nature is huge piece of the world that is being fazed out. So, it’s almost like I’m planting a tree when there is no physical ground to plant one. Trying to find places to stick them is a big part of it too. I keep this in mind when I’m walking around or riding my bike, and i try to put them in places where people’s eyes are drawn too. stop signs, big windows on a tall building, just really random spots that i happen to look at when I’m around.

Here are some examples to ponder in the critical cranium:

Note first the playful puffy blue miniature dinosaur. What is the cautionary tale here? Watch for play things darting down the street? If we continue to drive these roads, we will become extinct — we will go the way of the dinosaurs? Again, someone has appropriated official material, this time federal stickers provided by the post office, and handscripted them to reveal pithy slogans like “Don’t Get Mad, Get Lip,” like seek your own outlet and voice, that’s where the power is. Don’t complain about our savvy use of signage and excorporation … The art crue has marked its territory by recycling the adhesives of the state.

A Neighborhood Watch Program of a different variety, set in the counter-cultural milieu of 13 St. with its art co-ops and radical ruckus. Though these are posted throughout the territory, I found the juxtaposition of the marijuana leaf to be revealing, not to mention the hand-scratched five pointed star. Has this carved out an oppositional message mere blocks from the police station with its posters neatly arranged on windows outlining how to throw a responsible party? Who is watching who? Where does the power preside? Is anarcho-syndicalism the underlying message here, or a libertarian impulse and paranoia, or a struggle for democratic space and peace against the perceived realpolitik of the police?

It is not surprising that a band called Paint By Numbers, a rock band from Portland, would have a league of fans who might spread their vinyl art on concrete retaining walls in a quiet neighborhood, especially since the band has a song called “Decorate Your Pavement.” What are the other multiple meanings inherent here? For instance, are they telling us to paint by numbers on this black slate-gray canvas? Are they telling us that a sticker is itself a commercial enterprise, a painting by numbers — the obvious wrapped in the cocoon of the cool?

Reading this metallic canvas is almost dizzying — note the blurry stencil of a face on the right, the hurried scrawl of the declarative “Looking for Obscure Things” at the bottom edge, which catches us in the middle of the act of looking, plus the soft dinosaur returns to remind us how fossilized such municipal “power” is, while the prime sense of urgency seems to be nother kind of “stop,” as in stop driving the cars that are spewing fumes mere feet away from this pomengranate red display of how streets, according to Blake, have become “chartered,” full of “marks of weakness, marks of woe.” So much compression of the vernacular into the outlet/sign produced by the city to keep us safe…

At first, this may appear no more than utilitarian, everyday tagging to mark turf, though the balance of colors makes it more nuanced, but look closer and you’ll note the official sticker provided by the utility box company, including a symbol for, hmm, “electric spasm” or “rendezvous with explosity” or “cloud of hyper-charged material” juxtaposed next to the rather new wave-looking dancer who doubles as victim of instantaneous combustion. Sure, break this thing open and anything, even death, may happen, but does the subtext suggest that this is an explosive place to disseminate messages too? Can we be shocked, even carbonized, out of our lull and normalcy by the sheer presence of vernacular communication, stolen from the surface of industry?

Though this likely deserves to be placed in a sub-field of paper graffiti, it does add variety, especially when tastefully placed alongside what appears to be an example of the subconscious art of graffiti removal, a haphazard “ghosting” of some black tag, which now adds energy, flow, and balance to the utility box installation. What does this signify — a point of easy access and solid surface? A human face on the humdrum interface between industry and neighborhood? A reclamation and resurfacing of the ignored and forgotten spaces that reside inbetween dwellings? The new paper city unfolding beneath our eyes?